Welcome Back to the World

Unlike most mammals, teachers tend to hibernate in the summer. For the last 6 weeks, I've kept about 1/8 of my brain in touch with environmental issues in the 'Ham. Now, it's time to wake up and get back to work. Another B'ham News article about storm water quality came across my inbox this morning. The most salient points: 1) Shleby County can't manage it's storm water issues on it's own, and may be in violation of the Clean Water Act, and 2) Soon-to-be-bankrupt Jefferson County, is next in line for the same violations. Read the entire article here.

I learned a great tool for teaching environmental issues in Keystone, CO, this summer. It's called the PESTLE approach: Political, Economic, Social, Technical/Scientific, Legal, and Environmental. All of these varied interests bring valuabe insight to a discussion, and each interest has a stake in the outcome. If local county governments, business advocacy groups and environmental advocay groups can start (or continue) to take a PESTLE approach, we might be able to make some necessary changes to Alabama water issues.

Author's note; having worked closely with the Cahaba River Society, I can attest to the CRS's commitment to the political issues and economic interests of the region. It's time for local business leaders and politicians to take an honest look at the environmental, social and economic implications of poor environmental stewardship.

The Beat Goes On

Life is what you make it. Technological tools are what you make them. Are the internet and the web 2.0 tools merely entertainment and diversions or can you actually learn something from them? This is something I'll be thinking about,exploring, and literally working through this summer and next fall.

I've made some cool connections with old aquantances via facebook that have produced fruitful discussions. Check out this link about food and fuel. It's nice to know other people are working this stuff out in their own church basements.

Fog of War - The Movie!

Thanks to the magic of the internets (and the good folks at Google), here's The Fog of War in its entirety. This works especially well for those of you who have various tests this week and won't be able to watch some or all of the film in class.

Again, think in terms of empathy and parallels. Yes, there's a lot of history referenced -- some you may be familiar with and some you may be encountering for the first time. The important thing in the context of 21CC, though, is that you take a minute (or 107 of them) to think about Robert McNamara as a precursor to you, the 21C Challenger. He and his generation faced largescale issues; we face largescale issues. He had his ups and he had his downs, many of them on the largest of large scales. Pay attention to the eleven lessons the film enumerates but also see if you can't extract other lessons that are just as (more?) pertinent to your own experience.

And as Mr. Reardon suggested this morning, think about how interconnected our own "21C Challenges" are to what has come before. To wit: WWI leads to WWII leads to the Cold War leads to the Soviets in Afghanistan leads to Osama bin Laden's U.S.-aided paramilitary career leads to...21C Challenge. There are about a gazillion Matrushka dolls just like that one. Or at least four or five. (And perhaps the bin Laden sequence is an oversimplification, to some degree.) Point is, knowing the history is crucial. Just because there wasn't the internet for the vast majority of the 20C doesn't mean it's not relevant to our current circumstances.

Chiming in...in the end

One of the great ironies of a school year is the need for an end/a break even though learning never stops. At some point I'd like to reflect and flesh out this idea; but for now just think about an unmentioned challenge: the pace and volume of new information.

I spent just a few minutes on the the Beitleblog and before I knew it, I was sucked into three parallel blogs (Steven Johnson's to name one). I just came up for air and shook my head. How do you remain educated, relevant, and focused in the digital age? I'm curious to know how all of you approach this question.

One more thread/comment (for now). If you want to look at some parallel perspectives to our 21st century challenges, check out dot earth. I think the author, Andrew C. Revkin, HAS been eavesdropping. Even if he hasn't been eavesdroppingt, it's good to know we've got friends out here.

Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara

Next Wednesday and Thursday, you'll have the opportunity to watch a documentary film called Fog of War. (I say "opportunity" because you can beg off if you want to use the time to work on your final project and/or your blog.)

The film's about a man named Robert McNamara (as you may have guessed, that's him up there). McNamara had a varied and influential (some would say infamous) career in both the public and private sectors; he's most well-known for his service as the Secretary of Defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, but he was also the President of Ford Motor Company in the 1950s and he finished his career as head of the World Bank. Suffice it to say, if there was a class called "20th Century Challenges" he'd be the one to teach it because he had a front row seat to most of them, everything from the 1918 flu epidemic when he was a mere tot, all the way to WWII, the Sixties (and everything that portentous decade entailed), Vietnam and beyond.

I want to use this documentary -- this man -- to conclude our festivities for at least four reasons:

1. First, we spent last week talking about the role of government and I'd like you to continue thinking about what government is supposed to do -- what it does well -- and what it doesn't do well. I don't think there's a hard and fast answer to those questions, but I do want you thinking about them. As I said last week, we may very well be entering an era when the role of government, both here and abroad, is making a fundamental shift. There appears to be a prevailing sense -- right or wrong -- that government can and should do more. Fog of War is, I think, instructive when it comes to understanding both the potential and the limitations of governments and government officials, even (or perhaps especially) if they're really, really smart.

2. Speaking of really, really smart people: the second reason I want to show the film is because McNamara himself is not unlike you. He's really smart (and he knows it). As a young man, he was really ambitious and he wanted to have a role in solving the problems of his day. That worked out well in some respects (Seatbelts! Yay!) and not so well in other respects (Bay of Pigs, Gulf of Tonkin [:(]...boo!). Regardless, he collected a lot of insights from his varied experiences, his success and his failures, and I think those insights are useful for folks who want to give their talents and energy to tackling today's most vexing issues.

3. Oh yeah: vexing issues. I want to show this film because it drives home an important point. There have always been vexing issues. Some even more vexing than the ones we're facing now. It's not so much the issues themselves; it's how you approach them.

4. Last, I want us to consider one of McNamara's lessons in particular: "Rationality will not save us," he says. Much of this class has been about applying rationality -- reason, intention, Logos, whatever you want to call it -- to the challenges we've considered. I'll go on record as saying that we've got a dearth of rationality in our cultural ecosystem, and that's a problem. But here's a guy who structured his life around reason, facts, evidence -- a guy who applied those particular intellectual tools directly to the great conundrums of his time. He's the 20th century's poster boy of Logos. And yet at the end of the ride, he looks back on all of it and says, "Rationality will not save us." What on earth could he mean by that? I say we watch the film and find out.

Obama's Vietnam?

Speaking of Robert McNamara and, by association, Vietnam...and, by association, the idea that the government should be run by "the best and brightest" minds who see government as a powerful tool to effect real and meaningful change both at home and abroad...

Speaking of all that, it's tempting to draw parallels between the Kennedy administration and the Obama administration. Tempting and certainly not scientific. But, you know, interesting. And Kennedy -- for all his best-and-brightest, all his hope and optimism -- pretty much started the Vietnam War.

So here's a link to an article in today's Washington Post. It's an extensive consideration of the Obama administration's new, hard(er) line approach to Afghanistan, in particular to its increasingly controversial leader, Hamid Karzai.

I'm not smart enough to know what the true parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam are (if there are any at all). I do know that that part of the world -- the higher-ups in the administration call it "Af-Pak," thereby throwing the ever-more volatile Pakistan into the mix -- presents some majorly thorny geopolitical issues (as did Vietnam), and it could all very well blow up in our collective face (as did Vietnam) if'n we're not careful.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about K-12 Public Education...

...but were smart enough not to ask. Some links:

On Teachers and Teaching
...Malcolm Gladwell writes in The New Yorker about how hiring good teachers is a lot like...drafting an NFL quarterback? Which is to say it's almost impossible to get right -- or at least the job requires such a wide (and weird) assortment of skills, it's impossible to know who's going to be good at it until they're actually doing the job. A pull quote: "In teaching, the implications are even more profound [than in the NFL or other similar fields where it's difficult to predict a candidate's future success]. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before."

On School Reform
...Here's an article in Slate about KIPP, which stands for Knowledge Is Power Program. KIPP is an ambitious school reform model that advocates higher standards and longer school days/weeks/years for economically disadvantaged kids in the public school system. Here's a link on the KIPP website to other articles about the program. The program is mostly lauded as a success but it has its detractors, who say its methods are harsh and that it can't be reproduced everywhere.

...Here's a Time article on Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the notoriously underperforming Washington, D.C., public schools. Rhee's on a mission to reform that system -- primarily by weeding out bad teachers and paying good ones more money. Not surprisingly, teachers unions disapprove. (For what it's worth, here's an interesting little tidbit via the Washington Post on Rhee, uh, re: the Obama administration's approach to education policy. Let's just say she held her nose when she voted for Obama-Biden.)

...What's the common thread between these two reform models? The adminstrators involved are Teach for America vets. (They're also enamored of test scores as a primary determinant of school success.) Me, I'm a TFA skeptic. Most of my friends who've done it came away scarred from the experience (and that's to say nothing of the students involved!). Very young teachers with very little experience (teaching-wise or life-wise) or training + some of the nation's failingest schools = recipe for disaster. But that's just anecdotal. What do I know? I do think it's interesting how a group of young educational administrators seem to be cutting their teeth there (and in programs like it) and then using that dramatic/unique/harrowing experience to reimagine how we teach our kids. Good? Bad? Hrmmm. Both?

On No Child Left Behind
...A middle school administrator writes an op-ed on NCLB in the San Francisco Chronicle.

...What's NCLB, you ask? Why, it's this!

...And here's what the new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, thinks of it (and more), via an interview with Newsweek.